Students who need a quiet place to go to study for finals will have a new option open for them in the late hours of the night or the early hours of the morning.
The library will be open to all students this week and next for 24 hours. The days the library will be open 24 hours will be Sunday, Dec. 8 through Thursday, Dec. 12 and then again from Sunday, Dec. 15 through Thursday, Dec. 19.
The library changed its hours for exam time because of requests that came from students, said Dean of the Library Sara Bushong.
“Students have commitments until late at night,” she said. “So they don’t usually start studying until around 10 [p.m.]”
Bushong was approached by the Undergraduate Student Government to extend the times the library would be open the week before and week of finals week.
“It is an extra cost to us, but we’re confident students will be here,” Bushong said. “We will have to test it to see if we can do this in the future.”
The staff, which is primarily graduate students, will be there until 2 a.m., and from then on the library will be manned by the campus police, who will be there from midnight to 7 a.m.
Bushong said the services offered, such as checkouts of books and access to the upper levels of the library, will be closed off after 2 a.m.
President of USG, Alex Solis, came up with the idea with USG to extend library hours after touring other campuses.
“When we looked at a couple of schools in Ohio … they have 24-hour libraries running,” Solis said. “We saw an affect on grades through this, so we looked at this model and how we can start it.”
However, the library needed to approach becoming a 24-hour service all year slowly, so USG chose the week before and week of for students that need to work on end-of-the-year projects and study for exams as a starting point, Solis said.
“We will see how it runs,” he said. “I hope students use it. We aren’t administrators or faculty that have an 8-5 normal job hours; we are up late. Now we can see if the library could help.”
Student Affairs Chair Nicolas Puccio was approached by Solis and Vice President David Neely and asked to set up a way to see if extending library hour times was something students wanted.
Puccio said he hosted Union tables and sent questions through email to more than 1000 students.
“We got in total about 920 responses from both,” Puccio said. “We had hardly any [opposing] opinions against the longer library times.”
The surveys also asked about extending the Outtakes and Learning Commons hours as well.
“Almost all were in favor for longer hours,” he said. “However, Outtakes got a little more support than the Learning Commons.”
Busong said the longer hours will be more cost to them, but will be worth it.
“We need to respond to student needs,” she said. “They need a place to go, and there aren’t many other options, especially if they need a book.”
